


A Little Too Much

by cathouse_mary



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Drinking, Drunkenness, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-28
Updated: 2013-05-28
Packaged: 2017-12-13 05:02:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/820305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cathouse_mary/pseuds/cathouse_mary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alan wakes up with a hangover... and his Senior.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Too Much

The last thing Alan remembers clearly is leaning on the bar at the Scythe and Raven, Senior Slingby to his left and Senior Sutcliff to his right. They are not so much leaning on the bar as using the barstools and their elbows to hold themselves upright because all three of them are pie-eyed, falling-down drunk. 

They are falling-down drunk because of several factors. The first factor being that Alan’s passed his probationary period and had his pick of new glasses and a pay raise. He is now Reaper Humphries in full, and his seniors want to celebrate. The second factor to being falling down drunk is Eric’s barkeeping friend having just come back from Havana, brimming with new rum cocktail recipes and a yen to try them out. The third factor is that his seniors do not drink like fish; to describe their imbibing style like that would be to drastically understate the case.

Grell and Eric - as he’s been ordered to call them - drink like trees.

“Now this is called a Zombie.” He’s pouring the delicious-smelling, candy-coloured drink over the ice and then sticking little paper brollies in each one. “Bottoms up!”

The three of them clink glasses and obediently bottoms up.

Alan sets the emptied glass down on the bar and-

\- and knows it’s a really bad hangover when it wakes one up to say so at a volume to make one clutch one’s head and whimper. 

_Never drinking again. I swear by Typhon’s eyes, I will never ever never drink again especially not with Senior Slingby and Senior Sutcliff and especially not rum or anything that tastes like candy and-_

Someone was snoring. 

Someone was snoring who was not him.

The snoring someone whose back was against his.

Someone else’s warm, bare back against his bare back. 

In fact, Alan becomes rapidly aware that he is absolutely bare of anything - even his glasses.

Close on the heels of that interesting information is the realization that he’s not, in fact, in his own bed but in someone else’s.

And there’s another feeling under the horrible gluey pain of the hangover, one that makes him blush so hard that his head thumps like a timpany. Under the hangover, Alan’s body is very, very happy and this is because Alan has been very, very well fucked. There’s no mistaking the lush relaxation of his muscles, the spent sensitivity of his tackle, and the buggered sensation of his poor, delightfully sore arse. The beard-burn on his neck and jaw seeps in, and a feeling of being sticky in places, but nothing blots out the bone-deep satisfaction that comes from falling madly in bed with someone.

Without opening his eyes, Alan wracks his brain, trying to push aside the rum-fog to remember something, anything about what happened after they drank that last-

_“Are you sure? Be very sure.”_

The memory is so vivid that Alan can feel the brush of lips and the warm puffs of someone’s breath against his ear, the scents of alcohol and smoke, cold stone and river water. The voice is low, heated, and rough with lust. Just the memory of the words sends a surge of wanton desire through him. 

Behind his closed eyelids, blurred snapshots of the evening come like clips of someone’s record. The WC? He’d been so jelly-legged that he had to hold on to the top of the stall to be steady enough to aim. Eric had been washing his hands, trying to sing and too plastered to remember the words.  Eric half carrying him out of the pub. Senior Spears actually carrying Grell out and loudly berating him(her) as a disgrace to the uniform he(she) wasn’t wearing. A walk by the river in the cold night air to sober them up.

The next snapshot features Alan’s hand down Eric’s trousers.

Oh. OH. FUCK. 

It’s a good thing Reapers do not need to breathe. Alan is so mortified that he stops for about five minutes.

Right. All right. Think. Eric Slingby. Yes, Alan was harboring more than a mild crush on his senior officer. In fact Alan had harbored a raging case of the hots for Eric Slingby since the older man taught Advanced Technique in Alan’s last student year. 

Alan just thought he’d had a better rein on himself than that. Just shoving one’s hand down someone else’s…

_“Are you sure? Be very sure.”_

Those were not the words of someone protesting a hand in the pants. Those were the words of a man who was certain of what he wanted, and it was not about to stop with a hand in the pants. Holy. Crap.

Alan’s eyelids snap open like window shades and the morning light immediately stabs him in both eyes. Alan eases his eyes shut in deference to the hammering in his brain. Never drinking again.

So, somehow they went from pub, to river, to… where? 

Alan eases one eye open again and looks for his glasses. The problem is that he needs glasses to find his glasses. Cautiously he feels around his part of the bed, then over the edge. His glasses are neatly folded, tucked against the mattress that seems to be sitting on the floor. Putting them on brings the room into focus - especially clear are the twin trails of clothing that start at the door and end with Alan’s drawers spinning around and around on the blades of a ceiling fan.

It’s Eric’s place. The floors are bare wood, naked of any rugs. There’s a mattress on the floor, a reading chair and hassock in a corner by one of the haphazardly curtained windows. And from floor to ceiling, on all walls of the room, are bookshelves of stout oak and thick shelving, holding book upon well-tended book in orderly rankings. Eric is always reading something, but Alan never in his wildest dreams imagined anything like this. One of Alan’s teachers said that there is an Outer Man - a face presented to the world at large - but the Inner Man was a secret in the heart of a maze. 

Eric Slingby’s Outer Man is a tomcat. Eric Slingby’s Inner Man is a librarian.

Oh, Alan knows that there’s more to his Senior than Eric’s facade. It’s just that he’s so damnably hard to get at - blustering, bamboozling, and blowharding his way past most in-depth scrutiny is just Eric Slingby. The womanizing is part of that tomcat persona, but the sparks never flame, and Eric moves on in a night or at best a few weeks. It’s not anything as crude as conquest or sport, as Eric has scornfully proclaimed that a mortal idiocy, it’s… fun. Some women have been serious about Eric with an eye to making him a house-pet, but Eric has never been serious about any of them nor led them to believe that he had any intent.

_“Are you sure? Be very sure.”_

Did Eric say that before or after Alan’s hand went down his trousers?

About what did he want Alan to be sure? Bedding him? Alan has been very sure about that for years. About being very fond of his sometimes mother-henny Senior? Again, sure of that. Of being fascinated by Eric’s fandance of personalities? At times one wants to tie him to a chair and interrogate, but it’s not a Junior’s place. 

One thing of which Alan is very sure is that after this, he cannot not stay on the fence he’s been sitting since Eric became his mentor. He had to make some kind of resolution and peace with his unruly emotions and-

Eric’s back heaves in a sigh. “Typhon’s swinging nutsack, Alan, are you going to think it to death?”

“How long have you been awake?” Alan blurts, blushing again.

“Long enough to hear your brain running in circles.” Eric groans, rolling over. “I am never drinking anything with rum in it again, or anything that smells like boiled sweets.”

“Same. What was that last one called?” Alan gathers his courage and rolls over to face Eric - just as hungover and unshaven as himself. “A Zombie. New rule: Never drink something named after the walking dead.”

“I’ll stick with whisky and beer.” Eric slips his glasses on and looks at Alan with uncharacteristic solemnity. “I asked you to be very sure. Are you still sure?”

The question is simple, the answer complex and Alan knows that he cannot afford to think it to death or Eric will keep him permanently at arm’s length.

“I am where I have wanted to be for a long time.” He starts carefully, constructing his thesis. “Since I was a student, in fact. I had a terrible case of the hots for you.”

“Lust, then?”

He parses Eric’s neutral tone; the tomcat is wary. 

“Then, but not only that now.” Alan can admit it. “It’s simple to get hot over the purely physical aspect, but a good wank covers most of that. The other aspects of my attraction to you are more complex than erotic desire.”

The warmth of Eric’s smile almost knots his brainstem. What Alan wants is… in. He wants that; this Eric that he sees only in the most fleeting and unguarded moments. He wants that kind of warmth, and care, and the feeling of having a place not just in the world, but in another’s heart. In a job where one must put so much of the Inner Man away in darkness, Alan wanted to feel that warmth and follow that light home. 

“Maybe we were both drunk - all right, we were drunker than Bacchus - but I am sure of this.” Alan reaches out, fingertips brushing Eric’s cheek. “I am where I want to be, in all aspects. Of this I am very sure. However, I do have one question.”

“And that is?” Eric rests his fingers on the back of Alan’s hand.

“Did I just, you know, go and jam my hand into your trousers?”

The bellow of Eric’s laughter convinced him more than anything that it was going to sort out just fine. “No, Alan. You kissed me first.”


End file.
